SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system. The HANA platform is fundamentally based on the principle of pushing down data-intensive computations into a HANA database layer in order to benefit from HANA's in-memory capabilities and to avoid unnecessary data transfers between the database layer and an application layer. Computations can be pushed down using, for example, SQL SCRIPT procedures, different types of database views, application functions, etc.
HANA Deployment Infrastructure (“HANA DI” or “HDI”) is a service layer of the HANA database that simplifies the deployment of HANA database objects by providing a declarative approach for defining database objects (as design-time artifacts) and ensuring a consistent deployment into the database, based on a transactional all-or-nothing deployment model and implicit dependency management. HANA DI is focused only on deployment aspects and addresses both development and modeling scenarios as part of the HANA database.
Deployment of database objects using HANA DI is based on a container model where each container corresponds to a database schema. Containers can be used for multiple deployments of the same database artifacts and for other uses (for example, development sandboxes). Containers are isolated against each other by database means (for example, each database schema with its deployed database objects is owned by a per-schema technical database user). By default, a cross-container access at the database level is not possible.